People
Why hospitality tech leader Kate Cortez moved from using MeetingPackage to building it
Ari Kuparipuro
When your new Director of Implementation starts a story with, “So my team and I built your Global Lead Passing tool with you in 42 days as a client,” you know you are not onboarding just anyone.
Meet Kate Cortez, a 28 year veteran of hospitality technology, long-time implementation leader and self described LinkedIn lurker, who went from MeetingPackage customer to the person shaping how our largest customers will be onboarded in the future.
Falling back in love with software
Kate spent most of her career on the tech side of hospitality, including 19 years at a major global software provider for hotel groups. Over time she became the person brands trusted to deliver complex projects and connect the dots between systems, people and processes.
Then she moved from vendor to customer side. That is where MeetingPackage first entered the picture.
“We built out the Global Lead Passing tool in 42 days and I realised how much I missed that energy,” Kate says. “I had been out of software for a while and suddenly I was back in a room with people who could listen to a problem on Monday and ship a solution on Thursday.”
That combination of product vision, speed and willingness to pivot around the client’s real problem is what ultimately persuaded her to switch sides again.
What started as a conversation about Instant Book turned into a broader deployment of MeetingPackage’s GLP, Sales and Catering light solution, and more. Somewhere in the middle of that journey, Kate went from “interesting vendor” to “this is the kind of company I want to work for.”
Kate at HITEC 2025. A familiar face at industry events.
What “good” implementation looks like to Kate
If you ask Kate what a successful implementation looks like, she does not start with tools. She starts with clarity.
A clear scope
Both sides know what is in, what is out, and what success means.User adoption, not just go live
“It does not help to install a great product if no one is using it three months later,” she says. Her focus is on where the venue teams are after the dust settles. Are they using the system better than before, or have they silently gone back to spreadsheets and email?Testimonials and trust
For Kate, the real signal is when front-line users want to talk about the solution in a positive way and when the relationship shifts from “vendor” to “partner”.
“You always start as vendor and client,” she says. “If you do this right, it matures into a partnership. Crossing that line is the real sign of success.”
That mindset fits neatly with our mission to move venues from fragmented, manual workflows to a single Central Reservation System for Groups, Meetings & Events, whether it is through GLP, eProposal, or instant booking.
Scaling MeetingPackage implementations, one playbook at a time
Kate is not arriving with vague ideas. She is bringing frameworks she has tested with some of the world’s most complex hotel organisations.
Two of her favourites sound almost disarmingly simple:
RACI for every project
“Who is Responsible, who is Accountable, who is Consulted, and who is Informed,” Kate says. “If you do not define that for both the client and the vendor, you are building on sand.”
For MeetingPackage, that means every large deployment gets a clear map of who owns data, who owns process decisions, and who signs off on go-live.A living change log
Implementations are full of decisions made on the fly, often for good reasons. Three months later, no one remembers who decided what or why.
“A simple change log saves you from a lot of ‘when did that happen’ and ‘who asked for this’ moments,” Kate notes.
Layered on top of that are her three non-negotiables for our future implementation model:
Repeatable
The process should be predictable enough that venues know what to expect, and we know what good looks like.Scalable
“We need to be able to install large quantities of hotels in a quick time frame, accurately, and so that everyone sees it as a win.”Automated where it makes sense
Think real-time availability, smart defaults, templates, calendar-based workflows, and integrations that remove manual touch points rather than add them.
Or, in a line that has already become part of our internal vocabulary:
“Just because you can do something does not mean you should.”
Sometimes the bravest implementation decision is to say no to a one-off tweak that would haunt every future rollout.
Two icons, one expression. Kate and the snowman keeping things cool at the Christmas markets.
How she sees the Groups, Meetings & Events landscape changing
With nearly three decades in the industry, Kate has seen the meetings business transform several times. Two shifts she highlights feel particularly relevant to what we build at MeetingPackage.
From site visits to screens and peer reviews
Pre- and post-convention meetings, menu tastings, in-person debriefs, flying in just to walk the floor. Those touchpoints are significantly less common now.
“Clients are going by photos and by what their peers recommend,” Kate says. “The showmanship from the hotel side is not happening at the same scale.”
That raises the bar for digital channels. The venue page, the quality of information in the booking engine, and the online proposal experience carry more weight than ever.
From simple room rental to “what experience are we creating?”
With more remote teams, the days when an offsite was just a room and coffee are fading.
“Groups are looking for experiences,” Kate notes. “What can attendees do together, what team building is available, how do you use that short time on site to build connection.”
For MeetingPackage, these insights are directly tied to how we think about products. It is not only about availability and rates. It is about helping venues package experiences and surface the right options to the right bookers, without 40 copy-paste RFPs clogging inboxes.
T-O-T-A-L values meet Kate’s leadership style
Before joining, Kate spent time reading about our values: Transparency, Ownership, Teamwork, Ambition, and Laughter.
The one that resonated immediately was transparency.
“In my mind, transparency fosters integrity and trust,” she says. “If you get that right, the other values almost have no choice but to follow. You get ownership and teamwork because everyone is working toward the same goal.”
Her leadership style fits naturally into that framework:
Authentic by default
“You are going to get what you get,” she says with a smile. There is no carefully curated persona, which makes it easier for teams to speak up.Empowering teams within clear guardrails
People were hired for a reason. Kate believes in giving them room to reach their potential, make decisions, and learn, while still holding the line on accountability.Shared accountability, not blame
Mistakes happen. Owning them together and making the system better is part of the job.
And yes, she has a sense of humour. It is hard to lead implementation across multiple time zones if you cannot laugh occasionally when a demo environment decides to have a personality.
Kate serving a weekly meal to the homeless - it was 34°F (1°C)
Outside the office: reality TV and real-world impact
It is not all RACI charts and change logs.
One of the most surprising facts about Kate is that she is a huge reality TV fan.
“In my downtime, I live off reality TV,” she admits. “Some of it is just senseless TV that lets my brain turn off. It is a train wreck and I get to watch it.”
Colleagues at MeetingPackage who share that guilty pleasure are already lining up for recommendations. There are rumours of a future “Reality TV anonymous” channel in Slack.
On the other side of the spectrum, Kate spends a significant amount of time giving back to her local community in New England.
She helps lead a monthly meal service at House of Hope, where a team prepares and serves around 150 meals to low-income and homeless guests, many of them elderly. She also volunteers at a weekly outdoor “manna meal”, where meals funded by local restaurant customers are handed out to people living in tents, along with donated coats and blankets.
“It makes you appreciate what you have,” she says. “When you are standing in the snow for a couple of hours handing out meals, it puts your own complaints into perspective.”
That mix of empathy, practicality and action is exactly what we want in the person designing how we support venues and chains.
Why this hire matters for MeetingPackage
For us, bringing Kate on board is about more than adding another experienced leader to the org chart.
It is a signal of where we are heading as a company:
Treating implementation as a strategic capability, not an afterthought
Turning MeetingPackage solutions into a repeatable, scalable rollout machine
Building partnerships where data flows, teams adopt, and customers stay long enough to tell their peers
Kate has spent 28 years working on those exact problems from every angle. Now she will be solving them from inside MeetingPackage.
We are very happy she chose to write her next chapter with us.
Kate Cortez is Director of Implementation at MeetingPackage, designing scalable, user focused deployments that turn smart meeting technology into lasting venue partnerships.
{% icon icon_set="fontawesome-6.4.2" name="Envelope" style="SOLID" height="16" purpose="decorative" title="Envelope icon" %} kate.cortez@meetingpackage.com
{% icon icon_set="fontawesome-6.4.2" name="LinkedIn" style="REGULAR" height="16" purpose="decorative" title="LinkedIn icon" %} Find me on Linkedin
When your new Director of Implementation starts a story with, “So my team and I built your Global Lead Passing tool with you in 42 days as a client,” you know you are not onboarding just anyone.
Meet Kate Cortez, a 28 year veteran of hospitality technology, long-time implementation leader and self described LinkedIn lurker, who went from MeetingPackage customer to the person shaping how our largest customers will be onboarded in the future.
Falling back in love with software
Kate spent most of her career on the tech side of hospitality, including 19 years at a major global software provider for hotel groups. Over time she became the person brands trusted to deliver complex projects and connect the dots between systems, people and processes.
Then she moved from vendor to customer side. That is where MeetingPackage first entered the picture.
“We built out the Global Lead Passing tool in 42 days and I realised how much I missed that energy,” Kate says. “I had been out of software for a while and suddenly I was back in a room with people who could listen to a problem on Monday and ship a solution on Thursday.”
That combination of product vision, speed and willingness to pivot around the client’s real problem is what ultimately persuaded her to switch sides again.
What started as a conversation about Instant Book turned into a broader deployment of MeetingPackage’s GLP, Sales and Catering light solution, and more. Somewhere in the middle of that journey, Kate went from “interesting vendor” to “this is the kind of company I want to work for.”
Kate at HITEC 2025. A familiar face at industry events.
What “good” implementation looks like to Kate
If you ask Kate what a successful implementation looks like, she does not start with tools. She starts with clarity.
A clear scope
Both sides know what is in, what is out, and what success means.User adoption, not just go live
“It does not help to install a great product if no one is using it three months later,” she says. Her focus is on where the venue teams are after the dust settles. Are they using the system better than before, or have they silently gone back to spreadsheets and email?Testimonials and trust
For Kate, the real signal is when front-line users want to talk about the solution in a positive way and when the relationship shifts from “vendor” to “partner”.
“You always start as vendor and client,” she says. “If you do this right, it matures into a partnership. Crossing that line is the real sign of success.”
That mindset fits neatly with our mission to move venues from fragmented, manual workflows to a single Central Reservation System for Groups, Meetings & Events, whether it is through GLP, eProposal, or instant booking.
Scaling MeetingPackage implementations, one playbook at a time
Kate is not arriving with vague ideas. She is bringing frameworks she has tested with some of the world’s most complex hotel organisations.
Two of her favourites sound almost disarmingly simple:
RACI for every project
“Who is Responsible, who is Accountable, who is Consulted, and who is Informed,” Kate says. “If you do not define that for both the client and the vendor, you are building on sand.”
For MeetingPackage, that means every large deployment gets a clear map of who owns data, who owns process decisions, and who signs off on go-live.A living change log
Implementations are full of decisions made on the fly, often for good reasons. Three months later, no one remembers who decided what or why.
“A simple change log saves you from a lot of ‘when did that happen’ and ‘who asked for this’ moments,” Kate notes.
Layered on top of that are her three non-negotiables for our future implementation model:
Repeatable
The process should be predictable enough that venues know what to expect, and we know what good looks like.Scalable
“We need to be able to install large quantities of hotels in a quick time frame, accurately, and so that everyone sees it as a win.”Automated where it makes sense
Think real-time availability, smart defaults, templates, calendar-based workflows, and integrations that remove manual touch points rather than add them.
Or, in a line that has already become part of our internal vocabulary:
“Just because you can do something does not mean you should.”
Sometimes the bravest implementation decision is to say no to a one-off tweak that would haunt every future rollout.
Two icons, one expression. Kate and the snowman keeping things cool at the Christmas markets.
How she sees the Groups, Meetings & Events landscape changing
With nearly three decades in the industry, Kate has seen the meetings business transform several times. Two shifts she highlights feel particularly relevant to what we build at MeetingPackage.
From site visits to screens and peer reviews
Pre- and post-convention meetings, menu tastings, in-person debriefs, flying in just to walk the floor. Those touchpoints are significantly less common now.
“Clients are going by photos and by what their peers recommend,” Kate says. “The showmanship from the hotel side is not happening at the same scale.”
That raises the bar for digital channels. The venue page, the quality of information in the booking engine, and the online proposal experience carry more weight than ever.
From simple room rental to “what experience are we creating?”
With more remote teams, the days when an offsite was just a room and coffee are fading.
“Groups are looking for experiences,” Kate notes. “What can attendees do together, what team building is available, how do you use that short time on site to build connection.”
For MeetingPackage, these insights are directly tied to how we think about products. It is not only about availability and rates. It is about helping venues package experiences and surface the right options to the right bookers, without 40 copy-paste RFPs clogging inboxes.
T-O-T-A-L values meet Kate’s leadership style
Before joining, Kate spent time reading about our values: Transparency, Ownership, Teamwork, Ambition, and Laughter.
The one that resonated immediately was transparency.
“In my mind, transparency fosters integrity and trust,” she says. “If you get that right, the other values almost have no choice but to follow. You get ownership and teamwork because everyone is working toward the same goal.”
Her leadership style fits naturally into that framework:
Authentic by default
“You are going to get what you get,” she says with a smile. There is no carefully curated persona, which makes it easier for teams to speak up.Empowering teams within clear guardrails
People were hired for a reason. Kate believes in giving them room to reach their potential, make decisions, and learn, while still holding the line on accountability.Shared accountability, not blame
Mistakes happen. Owning them together and making the system better is part of the job.
And yes, she has a sense of humour. It is hard to lead implementation across multiple time zones if you cannot laugh occasionally when a demo environment decides to have a personality.
Kate serving a weekly meal to the homeless - it was 34°F (1°C)
Outside the office: reality TV and real-world impact
It is not all RACI charts and change logs.
One of the most surprising facts about Kate is that she is a huge reality TV fan.
“In my downtime, I live off reality TV,” she admits. “Some of it is just senseless TV that lets my brain turn off. It is a train wreck and I get to watch it.”
Colleagues at MeetingPackage who share that guilty pleasure are already lining up for recommendations. There are rumours of a future “Reality TV anonymous” channel in Slack.
On the other side of the spectrum, Kate spends a significant amount of time giving back to her local community in New England.
She helps lead a monthly meal service at House of Hope, where a team prepares and serves around 150 meals to low-income and homeless guests, many of them elderly. She also volunteers at a weekly outdoor “manna meal”, where meals funded by local restaurant customers are handed out to people living in tents, along with donated coats and blankets.
“It makes you appreciate what you have,” she says. “When you are standing in the snow for a couple of hours handing out meals, it puts your own complaints into perspective.”
That mix of empathy, practicality and action is exactly what we want in the person designing how we support venues and chains.
Why this hire matters for MeetingPackage
For us, bringing Kate on board is about more than adding another experienced leader to the org chart.
It is a signal of where we are heading as a company:
Treating implementation as a strategic capability, not an afterthought
Turning MeetingPackage solutions into a repeatable, scalable rollout machine
Building partnerships where data flows, teams adopt, and customers stay long enough to tell their peers
Kate has spent 28 years working on those exact problems from every angle. Now she will be solving them from inside MeetingPackage.
We are very happy she chose to write her next chapter with us.
Kate Cortez is Director of Implementation at MeetingPackage, designing scalable, user focused deployments that turn smart meeting technology into lasting venue partnerships.
{% icon icon_set="fontawesome-6.4.2" name="Envelope" style="SOLID" height="16" purpose="decorative" title="Envelope icon" %} kate.cortez@meetingpackage.com
{% icon icon_set="fontawesome-6.4.2" name="LinkedIn" style="REGULAR" height="16" purpose="decorative" title="LinkedIn icon" %} Find me on Linkedin
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